Montgomery, James

Montgomery, James (1771-1854), poet, was born in Ayrshire, where his father was a Moravian minister, and was educated at a Moravian school near Leeds. In 1792 he took work with a bookseller at Sheffield who owned and edited the Sheffield Register. Fear of the libel laws caused the editor to abscond, and Montgomery took on the editing of the paper, which now appeared as the Sheffield Iris. In the conduct of this paper he incurred two terms of imprisonment, which resulted in the appearance of Prison Amusements (1797). In 1806 he published Wanderer in Switzerland, followed in 1809 by the West Indies, a poem on the slave-trade, in 1813 the World before the Flood, in 1819 Greenland, a missionary poem, and in 1827 Pelican Island. Among these volumes were scattered many smaller pieces. He retired from the Iris in 1825.